Visiting Feelings

Visiting Feelings

Cold spreading like ice across the shoulders
skin alert with goosebumps,
fingers and toes trending to numbness.
Fingers around the mug, liquid warm inside.

Spring’s first sunshine touches skin,
warmth interpenetrating, soaking body,
soft breeze caresses sleeveless skin, jaw melts.
In shade cool chill winter lingers still.

Summer heat sears eyeballs,
desiccated mouth saliva stripped,
candle wax flesh, energy, melts, droops.
Iced drink, gullet cold, seeping.

When joints ache, or pain scorches
muscle, organ, bone; when dentist drills
or some wounded place inflames;
feeling the place that does not hurt.

Tiredness visiting, heavy fatigue in body or brain.
Or alertness zinging the whole body alive.
Feelings are visiting; and visiting opposite feelings.
No resisting, surrender, just be.

© Tina Shettigara September 2019
with a nod to Lauren Rubenstein, inspirer.

Inspiration for this poem came from the wonderful children's book, Visiting Feelings. I recommend it for children and adults. Check it out: https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=Visiting+feelings&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

Insight

Insight

To know who I am I sit and wait.
Nothing to do but sense the silent buzz
of the living body as dynamic delight,
a vibrant effervescence and pizzazz
inside and out. I sparkle, zing and fizz
and all that’s here is potency and might.
Thoughts abate yet consciousness remains,
that spirit seer in whom it all unfolds;
this shimmering, she created, she sustains.
Becoming the seen, in body form she moulds
her energy as clay, and just as easily dissolves
it all back to herself again.
All in a flash I am that consciousness
Moment to moment unfolding the universe.

How to meditate

How to meditate

Drop your mind off at child-care.

It cannot go where you are bound.

Kindly say you will be back, then go.

And when it calls and cries, don’t turn.

Instead, sense your way into the pure nowness

of sensation. Every corner is alive.

Stay there. Stay. She who is all there is

Will reveal Herself, as you.

Stay.

As long as it takes. Stay.

Silence

Fully empty.

Stay.

Sense now the streaming thrum

Of everything. Thy will be done.

© Tina Shettigara 2019